High-current driver circuits are often used to drive signal lines having a large number of loads. Complementary field-effect transistor (FET) technology, such as CMOS, typically have very little DC loading when driving gate inputs, since there is almost no current drawn across the gate, however there is an AC capacitive load due to capacitance of the gate. In order to achieve high-speed switching, a high-current driver is needed to provide or to remove the electron charge on that capacitance.
A computer system can include a plurality of vector processors, as well as scalar processors, memory, input/output subsystems, and other features.
Advanced vector processors include a large number of elements (e.g., 128 elements) in each vector register, and a relatively large number of vector registers in each vector processor. Data being stored to a vector register will typically need to be driven to at least one or two gates for every element of a vector register (e.g., 128 or 256 gates or more).
Further, high-speed vector processors often use a clocking scheme in which a high number of successive results on successive clocks to successive elements of a vector register.
Thus, there is a need for a high current driver that will quickly switch a large number of loads. There is also a need for a clocking scheme for the high-current driver that maximizes data throughput.